No abstract

Within the renewable transport transition, a number of alternative technologies have emerged creating competing visions of how to reduce fossil fuel dependence. This paper examines the dynamics of competing fuels in two Swedish municipalities where electric buses have emerged, threatening incumbent biogas-based bus systems. While in Linköping, actors are resistant to the promise of electrification, in Malmö the shift to electrify urban buses has already begun. Here, the theoretical perspectives of obduracy and sociotechnical imaginaries are used to analyze obduracy and change in Linköping and Malmö, showing how the local contexts of these two municipalities influence obduracy or willingness to change. In Linköping, perceived connections between the biogas-based bus system and local infrastructures of renewable waste management and organic food production cause actors to place biogas buses at the center of a sustainable future region, while in Malmö linkages to the gas network (which also distributes natural gas) cause actors to question the sustainability of the fuel in use and opens up the city to welcome new electric vehicle tests. These examples show how fuel alternatives interact with each other in the wider renewable energy transition.

The choice of fuels has frequently been at the center of debates about how a future low-carbon mobility system can be achieved. This paper introduces two visions of biogas fuels and electricity using material from interviews and documents in Swedish transport. These visions are analyzed as interrelated sociotechnical imaginaries. To better understand the way visions of biogas and electric vehicles (EVs) dynamically shape and condition each other, four dimensions of sociotechnical imaginaries are further developed: spatial boundedness, temporality, coherence and contestation, and the socio-material relations they are associated with. Imaginaries of biogas and EVs differ with respect to these characteristics. The biogas imaginary is made up of locally bounded visions of the desirable future, showing how imaginaries can be fragmented and contested, often because of their embeddedness in local socio-material systems of resource use. This local boundedness is exemplified by contrasting cases of contested biogas imaginaries in the Swedish municipalities of Linköping and Malmö. The imaginary of EVs, in contrast, is more uniform nationally and even influenced by international expectations that in the future vehicles will be shared, electric, and autonomous. The qualities of these imaginaries shape the way they interrelate and coevolve as sociotechnical changes of the transport system unfold.

No abstract